calling the operator

Im Zentrum steht ein Anruf – bei der Operator:in, bei wem auch immer abhebt. Die Ausstellung ist eine Versammlung von Dingen, Klängen und Hörstationen, die eine wiederkehrende Frage stellen: Was passiert, wenn wir die Vermittlungsstelle anrufen? Wer hört zu? Wer ist bereit zuzuhören? Bei Auto entsteht ein Raum für hybride Präsenzen, für queer-ökologische Klangpraxis, für kollektive Partituren – spielerisch, situiert, kompromisslos amateurhaft. Die Ausstellung lädt ein zum Hören, Anfassen, Mitspielen.

 

Octave Magescas and Axelle Stiefel, among others, are calling the operator.

They give this name to the exhibition’s title.

The exhibition at Auto is their first show together.

Until now they have operated mainly as performers or facilitators.

For the first time, they put the collective itself in the room.

The exhibition gathers things that have somehow ended up tied to calling the operator.

Not by design, but because they keep coming back, asking: What happens when calling the operator? Who picks up? Are they willing to listen?

They will invest diverse zones of the exhibition space with things to listen to, handle, and play with.

calling the operator brings together the sonic practices of artists Octave Magescas and Axelle Stiefel. Formed in 2022, their collaboration grew out of a shared investment in collective experiments mediated by sound, and strategies of distributed authorship through listening practices.

Their work responds to a call from the field, at a crossroads between embedded art and sound art. They develop new musical pathways from an iterative archive, born out of a raw practice of field-recording. Their approach is playful, inclusive, situated, fiercely amateur. Renouncing technical fetishism, they summon a queer sound ecology that nurtures hybrid presences—the way environments, voices, and noises interlink with our listening, weaving relationships with the non-human. They develop tools for collective activation of performance scores, shifting the framework and redefining the boundaries of auditory experience.